Reviews
Review
Review of Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People by Mikhail Krutikov.
Review
A Yiddish Studies to Come: In Conversation with Adam Zachary Newton’s Jewish Studies as Counterlife
Newton’s book provides a stirring call for a Jewish Studies to come, a proposal for new forms of affiliation, both within the loose boundaries of Jewish Studies and extending outward to the whole of the Humanities and to the university as an institution. What might it mean for Yiddish Studies to participate in this coming community?
Oct 05, 2020
Review
Review of Seeds in the Desert by Mendel Mann, translated and with an introduction by Heather Valencia
These stories take place in Israeli cities, towns, and villages, in the post-war Soviet Union, and in Poland of the interwar period. However, it is often very difficult to tell where the stories actually take place, because they express an experience of dislocation and total disorientation.
May 20, 2020
Review
A Double Dose of Early Twentieth-Century Yiddish Talush-hood: Two New Translations by Daniel Kennedy
In new translations by Daniel Kennedy, Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s Warsaw Stories (White Goat Press) and Zalman Shneour’s A Death: Notes of a Suicide (Wakefield Press) can rightfully be labeled “classic”; they reach across time and space to name an eternal — and unromantic — facet of human experience.
Apr 29, 2020
Review
The post-Holocaust Parisian “Phalanstery” of 9 rue Guy Patin and its Legacies. Review of Rachel Ertel, Mémoire du yiddish
Rachel Ertel has been one of the most prolific translators from Yiddish to French. In Mémoire du yiddish: Transmettre une langue assassinée [A Memory of Yiddish: Transmitting an Assassinated Language], an interview with the French journalist Stéphane Bou published as a book in 2019, Rachel Ertel, who was born in July 1939, looks back chronologically on her life’s journey.
Feb 06, 2020